Forum - UX Design Prototype

April 2022 ||| Skills: UX Research, Design, Figma, Adobe Illustrator ||| URL: Design Folder

Forum is a project I created in April 2022 created using Figma and UX Research best practices

DIGITAL DESIGN ANALYSIS

The Problem

Due to the pandemic, many companies have shifted to working from home temporarily, and over 25% of tech companies in Silicon Valley (e.g. Facebook, Amazon, and Shopify) have planned for permanent remote work. With these changes in the workplace, the challenge of effective collaboration becomes a serious issue for remote teams. As a student, I face the pains of online communication on a daily basis and wanted to design a solution to solve this problem. The restraints to this problem are that the web platform needs to be designed in a way that is not only accessible to the user, concise, and engaging. The platform must also be able to link to the user's Github, include methods for screen sharing, and profiles to save questions and log in.

Process

The process for generating my solution started through user research and surveys with over 15+ employees of current tech companies. This was a solo project. From there on, I identified user pain points and started developing a user persona for my product. During my initial wireframing iterations, I started with just a single web application/forum where users could post their questions. However, through testing feedback and revising the user persona, I realized that a weekly condensed email forum would also be needed to increase the accessibility of the product.

Solution

The solution I designed is a private forum where employees can post about the challenges they have and receive detailed answers from their colleagues as well as an interactive screen share, if needed. An email digest will also be sent out weekly, so that employees will stay in the loop of problems their colleagues are facing. While creating this product, I also designed the product logo, brand colours, and embraced white space in my designs. I was able to validate that my solution solved the problem since it fit the user pain points, followed the restraints. To validate my solution, I would go back to my initial feedback group for testing of the wireframes, and roll out a beta UX test on Figma.

Reflection

I loved creating this solution and can envision the product making a big difference to the lives of millions of remote employees. While developing this product, I learned a lot about the product design cycle starting from the ground up. It is incredibly important to start with user research, identifying clear goals and understanding your user before creating low fidelity wireframes. If you jumped to the final result, you may not even be confident that your product solves the problem you are trying to solve. I would love to get feedback from my product from developers to see how accurately this could be portrayed in code, as well as managers at remote companies to hear their feedback on potential improvements. If I had more time, I would focus on creating the site more accessible, with a more detailed product flow, and ensuring that the colours and core components are able to be used by all employees (e.g. high colour contrast for those that are colour blind).